Felipe Seixas

"… we must remind ourselves that the idea that the world is made up of weightless atoms surprises us because we have experienced the weight of things. Similarly, we could not admire the lightness of language if we had not also learned to admire language endowed with weight."

Italo Calvino [1]

Felipe Seixas has sculpture as the main medium of his artistic practice. His artworks begin from a discussion on the material principles of sculpture, such as weight, lightness, balance, and especially, the materials employed in the artworks. Unlike the traditional operation of sculpture, the very act of sculpting, or the use of historically traditional materials, such as metal or marble, for example, Felipe's sculptures start from the encounter of certain objects and elements existing in the banal world of the everyday, such as concrete, rebar, rubbers, among other industrial and commercial materials.

To this principle is added an approximation, or appropriation, of questions from minimalist art, or arte povera, where the elements are organized spatially by sequenced compositions, lined up, or as balancing compositions on the edge of falling apart. In some moments the use of artificial light also arises, through neon, a lamp, a projector or even a TV monitor. These elements appear as an element of equilibrium, contrasting the dense and present materials in the artworks, such as concrete and coal, with the pulsating and unstable immateriality of light.

In his new solo show at the Zipper Gallery, Felipe Seixas gives continuity to his thinking on composing within the field of three-dimensionality, where once again concrete emerges as one of the central materials for the construction of the artworks. However, unlike previous works, this time there is no delicate geometric formal arrangement or extreme concern about fit or the precise pairing of parts. The material is now worked physically; it emerges raw, suspended against gravity, or yielding to it.

From the arrangement of these new artworks within the space, Felipe Seixas creates in the Gallery a landscape in ruin, burnt, broken and that becomes reorganized through composition to be reborn through construction.

In the 1950s Barnett Newman stated, "Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting."[2] Felipe's work proposes a flirtatious relationship between painting and sculpture, to walk through the space is an essential part of the work. The artworks drag on the floor, throw themselves up, lean or stand against the walls. Felipe's sculpture is not exempt from pictorial discussion, even if the colours used in the works, are the very colours of the materials chosen by the artist. The blackness of carbon or burnt rubber exists in the work in relation to the immateriality of the neon light, or the pulsating image of a projection. As in the world, flow and immobility face each other.

Douglas de Freitas

[1] Calvino, I. Six Memos fort he Next Millenium, trans. Geoffrey Brock, Mariner Books: New York, 2016